Culinary Anthropology

Tuesday, May 7, 2013

Tall and plainly dressed, a young woman stepped off
the train that had brought her from Virginia to Amarillo, Texas one early
autumn day in 1912. Georgia O’Keeffe was in love with the flat, colorful land
of the Panhandle, a love that would last her long lifetime.

“Wait a minute!” you
say. “She painted in New Mexico.” Right you are, for part of her life. But this
young O’Keeffe needed a job and she’d found one in a place that intrigued her.
We can claim her as a Texas artist for she left a marvelous legacy of this
young love. During the two years she taught art in the public schools of
Amarillo she spent hours roaming the prairie and the orange rocks of Palo Duro
Canyon with her charcoal and her sketch book at her side. Later she recalled,
“It is the only place I ever felt that I really belonged, that I really felt at
home. That was my country—terrible winds and a wonderful emptiness.”

After her time in Amarillo, she headed back
east to New York with a portfolio stuffed with those drawings. Some of these
may have been in her 1916 exhibit at Alfred Stiglitz’s Gallery.

Two
years later, O’Keeffe came back to the Panhandle as head of the art department
(of one) at West Texas Normal College in Canyon near Amarillo. She returned to
her wandering life, but now she was painting in the abstract style that defines
her work. She was not always fully appreciated.
The owner of her boarding house remarked after viewing one picture that
it “did not look like any canyon that I’ve ever seen.”

Intrigued by O’Keeffe paintings of the lonely
prairie and the wide night skies? If
you’re driving through the Panhandle, plan your trip to include the Panhandle
Plains Historical Museum at West Texas A & M University, the campus where
O’Keeffe taught. (You can even spend the night in the Hudspeth house where she
took her meals.) And be sure and take the short trek to Palo Duro Canyon itself
and watch the sunset. Surely you too will catch the magic.

When young Georgia made
those long treks down Panhandle roads and Palo Duro trails, surely she had some
sustenance tucked into the pockets of her black sweater. Here’s a long-ago
Panhandle recipe she might have taken along.

Palo
Duro Picnic Sandwich

1/2 cup softened butter

3 tablespoons prepared yellow mustard

1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce

6 green onions, finely chopped

6-10 leftover dinner rolls (depends on size and how
many are left!)

grated Longhorn cheese (about 2 tablespoons per
roll)

1/2 pound thinly shaved or chopped leftover ham

Combine butter, mustard, Worcestershire sauce and
onions. Split the rolls and spread the butter mixture on each half. Put cheese
on the bottom half of the roll, top with the ham and put the two sides
together. Put sandwiches in a 350
degree oven (if it’s a wood stove—about baking temperature) for five minutes or
until the cheese is melty. Wrap in brown paper and slip in your pocket. Of
course, these days, we’ll wrap them in foil. They freeze well; then bake them
for about 10 or 12 minutes.

Want to learn more about Georgia O’Keefe’s time in Texas?
Start with Georgia O’Keefe in Texas: A
Guide by Paul H. Carlson and John T. Becker. For Georgia in the kitchen, try A Painter’s Kitchen: Recipes from the
Kitchen of Georgia O’Keefe by Margaret Wood. For a complete biography of
this fascination woman, I recommend Roxana Robinson’s Georgia O’Keefe: A Life.

To see lots of images use Google Images or the search engine
of your choice.

Tuesday, January 8, 2013

Hijacking cars, robbing banks and
capturing imaginations of Americans dragged down by the Great Depression,
Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow spent
years scaring many folks and killing more than a few. But before they
started terrorizing the nation, they were just two tumble-down almost-kids
who’d never known many good times between them and thought they’d found heaven
when they found each other.

Bonnie,
born in Rowena, ‘way out in West Texas, lost her dad when she was only four.
Her mom gathered up the brood and took them all to her mom in West Dallas’s
Cement City. Bonnie shone as a good little girl, loving to read and write
poetry; in 1922 she was the junior spelling champ of Dallas. The literary life
of her dreams never materialized. By the time she turned 16, tiny Bonnie—she never reached five
feet—was a married lady. Didn’t last long. Two years later, husband gone, soon
to end up in prison she was on her own. She waited tables, did what she could. She
truly hated one job as a housekeeper for an acquaintance suffering with a
broken arm. She wanted nothing but out until one day in January, 1930, a fellow
dropped by the house to pass the time. Out in the kitchen she found a dapper
guy with a dimple in his chin, and she knew she’d found her heaven.

If
Bonnie knew hard times, Clyde Barrow knew harder. He knew how to land on his
feet—usually running! Growing up in a squatters’ camp tent in a under the Oak
Cliff Viaduct in Dallas, clever Clyde knew he’d get out, didn’t much matter
how. Floyd Hamilton, who later went to Federal prison for harboring the duo,
commented, “Life was desperate enough in West Dallas before the Great
Depression, but after 1929, it was almost impossible to stay honest.”
Certainly, that was true for Clyde. At
seventeen he rented a car, but he “forgot” to return it. The beginning. Three
years later Clyde was on the lam when Bonnie found him in that kitchen.

Soon
after their meeting, he’d come a-courting at Bonnie’s mom’s house when the cops
nabbed him. Did Bonnie drop that bad boy? No way. On Valentine’s Day, she
penned a long letter to Clyde, now in the Waco jail.

Honey, I sure
wish I was with you tonight. Sugar, I never knew I really cared for you until
you got in jail.

He wasn’t in
jail long. Bonnie smuggled in a gun. Clyde with three other fellows broke out.
He wasn’t free for long. By midsummer he was in the state penitentiary system
where he stayed for two years. He managed to kill one person will he was in. Patient
Bonnie waited for her man. Clyde Barrow was paroled in February, 1932. In
April, he robbed his first bank. The spree began. The nation, fascinated and
frightened grabbed the papers to read about how the gang kidnaped the Chief of
Police in Electra only days before they robbed the train station in Grand
Prairie. Headlines screamed about
murders in Sherman and Grapevine.
Murders, shootings, robberies, more murders, more robberies until May, 1934
when the victims were Bonnie and Clyde, killed in ambush set up by a gang
member.

Newspaper
sales broke all records. Their families buried them both in Dallas, but they do
not lie together as they’d always promised each other. Clyde is in Western Heights Cemetery .Bonnie, whose burial was
almost delay when more than 20,000 folks tried to attend lies in Fishtrap Cemetery. The largest bouquet at her
service came from a group of Dallas news boys. In the day after her death,
they’d sold a record-breaking more than half a million newspapers, and they
loved her for it. .

But
let’s go back to that exciting day when Bonnie found Clyde in her friend’s
kitchen. What was the desperado cooking up? Every account of this fateful
afternoon have Clyde standing at the stove mixing up some hot chocolate. We don’t know his exact recipe but here’s one a tough guy like Clyde
might concoct. No measuring, just crumbling, pouring and pinching.

About a cup of
whole milk—either 2% or skim, makes it a little less wicked, but not nearly as
good

1 pinch pumpkin pie spice, or ground cinnamon

Place chocolate pieces in a saucepan over
medium-low heat; add milk and stir constantly until the chocolate is melted and
well blended. Whisk in spices or cinnamon. Remove from heat; put in a cup and
hand to your honey with a kiss.

Want
to learn more about Bonnie and Clyde. I recommend three books, and, of course,
the great movie with Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. The books are Bonnie
and Clyde: the Lives Behind the Legend (Paul Schneider), American
Outlaws: The Lives and Legacies of Bonnie and Clyde (Charles River,
Editors), and The True Story of Bonnie and Clyde (Jan I. Fortune).

Thursday, August 16, 2012

Julia Child. I merely
say her name and visions of food, food, food appear. And there’s more—fun,
laughter, good company and learning—especially about food and fixing it.
Yesterday marked Julia Child’s centennial.

Let’s raise
a glass. Here’s to Julia! Here’s to happy hours in the kitchen!

And here’s
to cookbooks!

I’ve just
had the pleasure of reviewing Bob Spitz’s outstanding biography of the
intriguing Ms. Child—Dearie for Story Circle Book Reviews. (You can
check the review out at http://t.co/fQ0pR3R0)
While Julia turns out to be a dear, the title refers to how she addressed
others—they were always “Dearie.” Everyone, it seems, was dear to Julie. Okay,
almost everyone.

The sticky notes assure you--I'll be
reading this one again--and, probably
again.

I’ve
blogged about Julia (feel like I know her) before. I read the excellent
collection of her correspondence with Avis DeVoto, As Always, Julia, and
immediately wanted to share. (You can find it at http://bit.ly/PZmZCz
.)

Now it’s
happened again. Like just about any good book about food and/or cooking, Dearie
sent me off in two directions: to the kitchen to cook and to my cookbooks.
Fortunately for me the cookbooks live in the kitchen bookcase so I could go in
both at the same time.

Two old favorites--my newlywed favorite and my mom's.

At the
bookcase I grabbed a couple of books that have been with me a long, long time
and are as full of memories as they are recipes. I wish I could remember who
gave me Betty Crocker’s Dinner of Two as a wedding gift. No one could
have needed it more. I barely knew where the kitchen in my folk’s home was— my
writer mother encouraged me to write and read, but not to cook. So there I was
a bride who could boil water for a cup of tea and prepare a mean batch of
refrigerated biscuits. That was it. I needed, sorely needed, this book. It
lived on the kitchen counter. The pages are still crinkled and brown from the
spills and drips. But, not surprisingly, soon enough my family numbered five
and Dinner for Two went off the counter and onto a shelf. Never once did
I think of giving it away.

Now as I
through it, I remember that at-sea bride making the wonderful discovery that
she loved to cook. Still does. Oh yes,
the romantic Meringue Heart, or the exotic—to me—raspberry-current sauce for
ice cream. Did we only eat desserts? No,
there were the meatloafs during the week
and pot roasts on Sunday. Even liver and onions that the groom loved and the
cook found not bad, once she learned it didn’t have to be cooked for over an
hour as Mother did. (About 10 minutes does the trick.)

And my favorite recipe of all time
that I’ve never made—yet. The instructions for “Pheasant Baked in Cream”
begins, “Have the hunter . . .pluck, draw, clean and cut up the pheasant.” Good
idea, that’s not the cook’s job. As soon as Hunter Bob brings me a plucked,
drawn, cleaned and cut-up pheasant, I still may give it a try. Fact is I may
try several of these now that the household is down to two again!

After I reveled for a while in the
memories and promised myself broiled lamb chops with green peas and mint for
dinner tomorrow. I turned to another even older volume—a wedding gift to my
mother. Balanced Recipes put out by Pillsbury and copy written in 1933,
two years before my folks married. The treasures here are not the printed
recipes but the ones added in the back. I see Mother’s handwriting, and then my
Grandmother Beeman’s and then my Grandmother Nordyke’s. Suddenly I’m blinking
tears and decide to wait to explore this, and so—to be continued.

Meanwhile do you have some cookbook
memories? When and where did you learn to love cooking?

Tuesday, August 30, 2011

What is it? I don’t know—but welcome!I love it, and I love to write about it even if I don’t know what it is, I plan to visit often sharing my thoughts on food (culinary ramblings) and people (rambling on people--past and people present—that’s the anthropology part).A quick search for the definition of anthropology reveals that it is the “study of humankind.” That’s what I’m going to be writing about here. Humankind when they are cooking and humankind when they are eating. Often it will be about this one member of humankind—me and her adventures with food.

I’ve written about people and food. Several years ago, I did it formally with a newspaper column called “Stirring up memories” in the Bainbridge, GeorgiaPost-Searchlight. Check out www.trillap.com ; it’s ‘way, ‘way out of date (next resolution—do something about that!) but there’s a good sampling of the writing I’ve done about food, people and a little bit of local history and a dose of writing about myself with some food mixed in.

There is no plan here. Only that I plan to see what happens. I’m in Houston now, a great place to write about food and people. I’ll visit restaurants, talk cooking (mine and others) and look at our wonderfully diverse population with a hungry eye. I’ve blogged about food at another location www.trillap.blogspot.com, and I’ll kick things off with some reposts of the food I’ve written about there.

I’ll be posting! Meanwhile here’s a sampling of culinary anthropology.

Love to have one of these pies in
my pocket.

Food trucks, food trucks, all over Houston
all with mighty good eats!

Love it when Sylvia parks down the
street at the Menil Collection lot.